Setting up a miles donation fund for an individual
 

I do not wish to go into a lot of details, but someone I know has a family emergency with no financial means to fly their son home from an overseas locale. There is currently an ad-hoc monetary donation fund setup to buy a plane ticket for him, but I was hoping to perhaps setup a miles fund instead.

As of right now, looks like he could fly back on 10/31 using 30k miles.

How easily and quickly could this be setup?

If anything, if I buy the award ticket myself. Could donors simply transfer UA miles into my account at a later time? (Edited to add: Looks like you can, but with some ridiculous fees. :mad:)

Thanks in advance.

a couple of things come to mind here

the easiest is probably to do as you said and book the ticket from your own account, then try to figure out how to get reimbursed from those who want to contribute.

perhaps a more charitably appropriate way is to give people the opportunity to apply their cash donations to a mileage purchase which goes into a MP account you set up in this person's name.

to purchase 30,000 miles will be approximately $1050. chances are you can actually buy the ticket for cheaper than that.

a third option is to set up an MP account for this person and then a gift registry. people can contribute cash to the gift registry on .bomb and that cash can be used to buy the ticket. i don't think you can give miles to a gift registry on United but i am really not sure as i have never looked into it.

depending on the cost of the ticket needed, i guess one of these three will be the right option.

Right now, the cheapest one-way ticket is $1150.

If I look at the reimbursement route, I'm not sure how I would price 30k miles. If I do 2-cents/mile, it would come out to about $770 with taxes/fees. I was told the monetary fund is around $650 right now.

here's the gift registry page from .bomb

https://www.united.com/CMS/en-US/pro...tRegistry.aspx

seems like you can do a cash registry or a registry with miles where people can buy/transfer miles, presumably at standard purchase/transfer rates.

Have you tried pricing out the ticket as a round-trip?

what are the origin and destination for travel? we have folks around here who are good at finding good deals.

Based on the situation, there's no way to determine when (or even if) he'll fly back. Again, I do not wish to go into many details (sorry).

Booking it several months out and then paying a change fee may be cheaper than buying two 1-way fares.

On occasion (for international), the return will even be cheaper than buying a single 1-way fare.

I'm sorry to hear about your family friend. Sounds quite dire.

Have you inquired with the Corporate Angel Network? I don't know that they would provide international assistance, or even assistance to non-cancer patients, but you might inquire with them

http://www.corpangelnetwork.org/

I've had occasion, many years ago, to have flown on one as a companion to a patient. It is a remarkable service that gives one hope for humanity.

It might also be worth making inquiries with United directly -- be persistent, and see if you can get past the first level of bureaucracy which is set up to tell you, "no." There are standard discounts for bereavement fares that I seem to recall have been applied under other circumstances for medical emergencies, but you want to go beyond those, it sounds like.

+1. For intl, you want to check round-trips even if you have no immediate intention of flying the return.

Thank you all for the suggestions and help so far. Pretty amazing that you can still book round-trip tickets for cheaper with 3 days' notice than a simple one-way.

The family messaged on Facebook today thanking all of their friends for trying to get their son home, but they have said to not buy a ticket just yet. They are hoping this situation stabilizes, and he will return home in December after he finishes his studies for the semester. So basically, I'm now planning based on if the situation worsens.